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Foreign Accent and Forensic Speaker Identification in Voice Lineups: The Influence of Acoustic Features Based on Prosody
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General perceptual contributions to lexical tone normalization.

Jingyuan Huang1, Lori L Holt

  • 1Department of Psychology and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA. jingyuan@andrew.cmu.edu

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|June 11, 2009
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Speakers adjust their perception of tones based on the pitch of preceding sounds. This study shows context, even non-speech, influences tone perception in Mandarin speakers.

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Area of Science:

  • Phonetics and Phonology
  • Auditory Perception
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Tone languages use pitch variations for lexical meaning, presenting challenges due to speaker pitch variability.
  • Context-dependent perception is a potential mechanism to resolve pitch variability in tone languages.
  • Previous research on the influence of context on contour tone perception yielded inconsistent results.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To definitively test the effect of context on contour lexical tone perception.
  • To investigate the underlying perceptual mechanisms of context-dependent tone perception.

Main Methods:

  • Three experiments were conducted using Mandarin listeners.
  • Perception of Mandarin first and second (high-level and mid-rising) tones was tested.
  • Preceding speech and non-speech contexts modeling mean fundamental frequency (f0) were employed.

Main Results:

  • The mean fundamental frequency (f0) of a preceding sentence significantly affects contour lexical tone perception.
  • A contrastive effect was observed: higher preceding f0 led to perception of lower tones, and vice versa.
  • Non-speech acoustic precursors also induced this context effect, indicating general perceptual processing.

Conclusions:

  • Listeners utilize preceding acoustic context, including non-speech cues, to perceive lexical tones.
  • The observed contrastive effect suggests a general auditory mechanism rather than speaker-specific or articulatory factors.
  • This study provides unambiguous evidence for context-dependent perception in Mandarin contour tone processing.